Wed, 03 Nov 2010
Today, I was trying to find email messages that I had sent which haven't had
any responses. My MUA is mutt and my mail is stored in Maildir folders. This
could be done with a fairly simple shell script using find and grep, but with
about 40,000 messages in the one folder I wanted to search, I was looking for
at least a slightly more elegant solution.
The idea is to find messages I had sent (to a specific recipient in this case)
and extract the Message-Id; then for each Message-Id, search for messages with
that Message-Id in their In-Reply-To or References header. If no messages are
found for this second search, we conclude that no response has been received.
I ended up writing a simple shell script that makes use of mairix, which indexes each
of the three fields I need to search. Unfortunately, mairix doesn't allow
searching the In-Reply-To or References headers directly, but does provide a
way to return all of the messages within the same thread as messages returned
as a search result. This allows us to restrict the number of messages searched
in the second pass to a single thread instead of the entire mailbox.
See the script below:
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